Jordan Mintzer

The canvas may be strewn with glitter and glory, but beneath the surface Syversen provides a chilling look at how religion can be used to ignore deeper personal traumas, convincing youngsters to turn to god when they should perhaps be turning to therapy or something more probing.

What makes the movie work are the lively performances, both from the supporting cast and from Cranston, who sheds the mimicry and pontificating of earlier scenes to turn Trumbo into a wry, self-deprecating and somewhat cheeky older man, even if he continued to stand up for what was right.

The film playfully critiques certain Muslim customs, but never in a demeaning way, while providing a heartwarming coming-of-age narrative that’s a tad predictable.

The pacing is a bit flat in parts, with a little too much dead air, but the drama builds its way to an emotional finale where Sidi’s long and difficult life in exile comes full circle.

The film is not always subtle in its portrayal of a family ripped apart by tragedy, but remains captivating as a pure procedural that raises questions about the Paris police's handling of such situations, as well as about the state of race relations in contemporary France.

This isn’t Hiroshima Mon Amour. It’s more like Need for Speed Mon Amour done on a modest scale, with an effectively simple plot and nonstop action scenes that find a daunting number of ways to wreck and destroy cars.

It’s an if-it-ain’t-broke-then-don’t-fix-it approach that works just fine if you’re simply looking to take another ride on the rollercoaster.

Filled with strong performances and numerous twists that keep the tension high, even if the plot gets tied up a tad too neatly.

Both fun and thin at the same time, it’s not about much in the end except the idea of reuniting Pitt and Clooney to see if they still have their magic, which they mostly do.

Even if the air fizzles out a bit during the denouement, the film still accomplishes what it set out to do, with both Kahn and Bejo aptly shouldering all the narrative weight until the final scene.

French feel-good filmmaking to the max. Yet a heaping pile of cliches doesn't prevent this touchingly simplistic tale -- from exuding a strong and universal emotional appeal.

Mayor is a study in politics both micro and macro, showing what happens when the two come fatefully crashing together.

Ameur-Zaïmeche remains vague, perhaps frustratingly so, about his movie's identity — per the closing credits it was mostly shot in the South of France — but what he says about fear and isolation in a totalitarian society has a universal tinge.

With no commentary beyond audio clips and visuals composed almost entirely of historical footage, Periot uses the radicals’ own images and words to show how their discourse evolved over ten years from progressive to militant.

A film that can be somewhat conventional in form, including a score that overdoes it on the pathos, but one that still provides a fascinating deep dive into organized failure.

[Perry's] approach is one of a consummate enthusiast and completist, and he does manage to convey that dedicated fan energy on screen. But he doesn’t necessarily make it feel contagious enough.

Writer-director Xavier Giannoli offers up an amusingly entertaining portrait of fortune, infamy and severe melodic dysfunction in the polished French period dramedy, Marguerite.

The Ice Tower doesn’t grip you as much as it asks you to gaze at its hazy, nightmarish imagery, and either fall under its sway — or not.

Picture initially suggests a sort of Gallic "Damages," with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier in the Glenn Close and Rose Byrne roles, but the corporate catfight soon gives way to a cleverly designed whodunit.

The film maintains a certain level of suspense as it leaps between various epochs, often without warning. But, like many of Bonello’s movies, it lacks forward momentum and a sharp edit, lumbering along as it reaches into a grab bag of thematic and aesthetic concepts.

Barbet Schroeder offers up a touching look at unrequited love and neglected memory with the simpatico two-hander, Amnesia.

The fact that the director once again displays a true mastery of his craft, from Deffontaines’ exquisite framing to the decision to record all the songs live rather than having them lip-synched (apparently one of the only times this has been done since Straub-Huillet’s 1975 movie Moses and Aron), makes for a transfixing, if sometimes excruciating, cinematic experience.

With such well-tuned performances and scattered intensity, it's unfortunate that the technical aspects of the film are not always up to par.

Diciannove is unflinchingly honest about what it’s like to be 19, and, for the most part, totally lost. And Tortorici’s insistence on capturing that feeling while avoiding the usual narrative tropes is what makes his film both fascinating and somewhat impenetrable.

An aesthetically arresting hit man story that gets by more on its craftsmanship than on its minimalist, borderline ham-fisted narrative, Salvo nonetheless marks an impressive feature debut from Italian writing-directing duo Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza.

Good luck trying to make heads or tails of it, but as an eye-popping exercise in cinematic strangeness, 9 Fingers is a rare breed.

There are definitely more worthy endeavors than circling the globe in search of the perfect cut of meat, but French producer-director Franck Ribiere nonetheless delivers an absorbing, and often enlightening, quest for the world’s greatest sirloin in his exhaustive food documentary, Steak (R)evolution.

It’s a must-see for anyone interested in the mind of a major auteur, even if Thomsen tends to favor psychology over cinema.

The sadistic horror comedy Safe Neighborhood is the kind of film that’s tough to categorize but easy to enjoy, especially if you like watching teenagers do some very twisted things for the holiday season.

With her sophomore effort, Evolution, the writer-director delivers another disturbing mélange of experimental genre filmmaking and adorable, tortured French kids, offering up a trippy visual feast that satisfies on an aesthetic level, if not always on a narrative one.

Like his erratic protagonist, Gilroy doesn’t always know when to settle down or call it quits, and the film’s constant shifts of tone can grow tiring, even if the action as a whole never gets boring.

Most romantic dramas go from meet-cute to hooking up to some kind of major dilemma, but The Sun Rises on Us All heads more or less in the opposite direction.

Like the investigation itself, the meaning of Only the River Flows gradually finds its focus as the story progresses, leaving the viewer staring into the same abyss the detective does — an abyss that, as in any respectable film noir, stares back at him.

Despite some narrative cliches, the painstaking way that the movie documents a very dark period in Cambodian history is a noteworthy achievement.

The jokes are often ridiculous, as is pretty much everything else that happens, but there’s a palpable energy and visual inventiveness on display that keeps things watchable.

The painstaking work done by Kobiela and Welchman to turn some of the artist’s most prized canvases into animated scenes can be impressive to behold.

It’s definitely an over-the-top finale, and not everything ultimately seems real in King Ivory. But what makes Swab’s latest rise above your average drug thriller is how he tries to make each moment feel like it’s been drawn from a certain reality.

National Bird hardly offers any counterpoint to the arguments presented, nor does it attempt to show how drones could possibly save the lives of U.S. soldiers either on the ground or in the air. But it does reveal a program whose international reach and seemingly limitless surveillance powers are extraordinarily difficult to keep in check.

Adapting their highly successful stage version to the screen with keen comic-timing but much less cinematic panache, Mathieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patelliere offer up a lively take on love, friendship and baby-naming.

An episodic coming-of-age story whose plot holes are paved over by strong performances and a few emotional highlights.

Cage chews up every scene he’s in and seems to be having a blast — he’s always over-the-top and never boring to watch, in a film that delivers the goods for those who like him best when he’s just about lost his mind.

England steers his talented young cast in the right direction despite some snafus in his story, and the fine acting is what ultimately brings 1:54 to the finish line.

It’s about as French as you can get, to a point that feels borderline absurd in places, and yet Triet handles the material gracefully and altogether skillfully, directing star Virginie Efira to one of her most impressive all-encompassing performances to date.

The result is a drama whose emotional charge is a tad more subdued than usual, even if there are several grace notes throughout.

While the plot can sometimes feel too lightweight for feature length, with a score by composer Laurent Perez del Mar (Now or Never) that tends to overdo it on the gushy side, The Red Turtle benefits from the beautiful animation work of Dudok de Wit and his team.

As a portrait of French youth ridden by angst and anger toward the powers that be...Nocturama makes an intriguingly cinematic case for showing over telling. But as a depiction of how, and why, terrorists (or anarchists or whatever they are) can take down a city, it falls apart in the face of what happens in the real world.

Canet manages to deliver a fresh celeb satire here that doesn’t shy away from the uglier side of star power, with “uglier” taking on various meanings as the script (co-written with Philippe Lefebvre and Rodolphe Lauga) heads to some outré places in the last act.

The director never sugarcoats life in the Big Apple for Lu, his family, nor for the rest of the striving migrant underclass. There are no moments of triumph or dreams coming true, no holding hands and cheering together at a Yankees game.

It’s hard not to be both moved and slightly blown away by the plight of these birds.

It’s a lot to handle and also a bit silly, but Besson often pulls it off — thanks in no small part to a commanding performance by the chameleon-like Caleb Landry Jones (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), who manages to be touching and slightly terrifying at the same time.

What really helps Mountain overcome its far-fetched scenario is the pairing of Winslet and Elba, who know how to turn up the charm tenfold yet make Alex and Ben seem (mostly) like real people.

The Last Out is a moving reminder of how hard it is to make it to the big leagues.

This very Bronx tale of teenage pregnancy and inner-city strife can seem familiar in terms of content, but never in terms of form.

Black and White never panders too easily to sentiments, creating characters who are riddled with flaws but likeable all the same.

As pure entertainment it certainly does the job, although much of the text's existential weight is lost in the process.

And yet, what makes Greenland stand out is how, at certain times, what we’re watching doesn’t seem so spectacular, but very much like the real thing — albeit with a fair amount of VFX and Butler’s own brand of sweaty, stress-bucket bravado.

In the end, it’s hard to tell whether Simon is actually critical of her establishment’s methods or whether she fully embraces them, although she is clearly compassionate toward the applicants and offers a reasonable payoff when we finally learn who made the cut.

At well over two hours it’s way too long and heads more or less where you think it will, but it’s fun to watch Byun and Jeon deliver the goods both viscerally and, at times, movingly.

A classically helmed biopic that brings nothing new to the genre, but benefits from handsome craftmanship and solid performances by Tobey Maguire as the Brooklyn boy wonder, and Liev Schreiber as his longtime Russian nemesis, Boris Spassky.

Moss tackles the idea from a more intimate and feminist perspective, questioning how far mothers are willing to go for their children, or simply to become mothers at all. If what happens in her movie seems altogether extreme, maybe it’s because the world we live in tends to push such women to extreme places.

Juliette Binoche’s portrayal of the ill-fated artist is a study of restraint peppered with brief outbursts of emotion -- a riveting performance in an imposing, at times off-putting micro-biopic.

Like many science-fiction films, Star slowly but surely reveals itself as a parable of our self-destructive times – an artsy Interstellar with a threadbare narrative rather than one that’s forever running on hyperdrive.

Doyle overstuffs some of the content, jumping through dozens of interviews without allowing us enough time to process them. Still, the director and editor John Murphy manage to give all the material a solid through-line, making the many voices echo into one underlying argument: Showrunning sucks, but it may be the greatest job in entertainment today.

Unlike John Boorman's trippy 1967 L.A. noir of the same title, frenetic Gallic suspenser Point Blank provides few existential thrills but plenty of heart-racing action as it follows one man's marathon dash to save his kidnapped wife from execution.

Matarrese may be capturing a tiny utopia in one public hospital in northern Italy, but his movie leaves us with the hope that, sooner than later, such a place may not be so unique.

The subtleties and vagaries of human behavior sometimes get lost in the sheer mundanity of the action, although the film gradually builds toward a meaningful depiction of what charity actually means — and it’s far from what the volunteers set out to do in the first place.

What Olaizola does best is create an atmosphere of almost mystical uncertainty at times, setting her film in a place where the frontiers between countries, cultures, reality, folklore, past and present are in constant flux.

What’s most striking about Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, whose title is how Hassona describes venturing outdoors when she can be killed at any moment, is the way it forces the viewer to experience the blunt repetition of death and devastation faced by its central figure.

The two movies don’t always crystallize into one, and if you’re looking for a credible crime thriller in which everyone behaves logically, Misericordia may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an exploration of repressed sexual desire and religious hypocrisy in backwoods France, Guiraudie’s strange and sober new film does the trick.

Moussaoui captures the drama with a simple style that can seem a bit lackluster at times, although he makes good use of the Algerian locations and coaxes compelling performances from his cast. In the end, his narrative's three-pronged structure is perhaps the film's strongest asset.

It’s intense if somewhat choppy filmmaking, although the passion of the amateur cast and vividness of the Kinshasa locations help make up for the narrative shortcomings.

Paris Memories is a mystery movie, with Mia, like Guy Pearce’s character in Memento, following various leads and fractured memories to get to the truth. It’s also a story of emotional renewal, chronicling the phases of recovery that follow in the wake of a major catastrophe, with all the ups and downs that entails.

This playfully made exposé should be required viewing for anyone wondering what they could do to pitch in and save the planet.

The remake ups the adrenaline factor, and features strong performances across the board, yet feels bogged down by a weighty love triangle and a subject that merits more than the old-school good vs. evil approach.

Clever and giddily entertaining ... Hazanavicius is smart enough to apply an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it approach, keeping nearly everything intact except for the language and cast.